Labour needs to abandon all this Save the Union hogwash
IN a rather quaint break from all this progressive malarkey that’s sloshing about in Scottish politics, the Labour Party in Scotland appear to have taken a few steps back in time to address its journey to the centre of oblivion. The start of the New Year gives political leaders an opportunity to gaze into the future and rattle the bones as they attempt to unravel the portents of what the year ahead might hold.
In Scotland you might think powers of clairvoyancy are not really required to interpret the signs of the times and to formulate a plan for 2017. Brexit, of course, is sure to dominate most of our political discourse. The SNP will continue to turn up the heat on Theresa May as the Prime Minister seeks to gain a degree of control over her government’s chaotic Brexit strategy.
Mrs May has thus far failed to exert any authority on her chief Brexiters Boris Johnson and David Davis. Consequently, with each puerile Little England utterance by these two fools the prospect of a soft Brexit becomes each day more remote. All Ms Sturgeon has to do is to keep being a good European by urging this besieged Prime Minister to be sensible about granting pro-EU Scotland a measure of autonomy regarding free movement and belonging to the single market.
Effectively she is saying to Mrs May: “Look, all you have to do to shut down talk of a second independence referendum is to be reasonable and make special allowances for Scotland during your Brexit negotiations. The inference is clear: don’t blame us for moving for a second referendum in these circumstances; your refusal to bend has left us no choice.” In the wake of another horrible week for the Prime Minister she might yet regard the prospect of fighting another Scottish independence referendum as light relief.
Similarly, for the Labour Party in Scotland, producing a coherent strategy for 2017 that chimes with its values ought to be quite straightforward. This year will be a crucial one for the SNP Government in terms of how it will be deemed to have improved health care and taken proper steps to reduce the educational gap. Not much is expected of a party whose incompetence and hubris have brought it to the lowest point in its 117-year history. It simply needs to keep its head down and refrain from making any daft mistakes. It must continue to take baby steps in niche areas of social responsibility. Then it’s simply a case of sitting tight and trying to hold on to as much as it can during May’s council elections.
Occasionally, it might permit itself to make common cause with the SNP around Brexit and in exposing the reactionary and morally bankrupt sewers that run freely just beneath the surface of Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party. We even got a glimpse of them earlier this week as they re-affirmed their opposition to the latest round of benefit cuts set to be imposed by their bosses in London. These cuts, dubbed Bedroom Tax Two, will see younger renters in social housing lose up to 25 per cent of their assistance. The Scottish Conservatives’ response was predictably heartless and delusional. “Reforms in benefits are necessary and challenging,” a spokesman insisted, “which is why the UK Government has taken them on.”
Where do you start with a response like that? Reforms in tax avoidance are also challenging, but necessary. As are reforms in the way that big party donors can distort democracy by bribing ministers. Reforms in executive pay and bankers’ bonuses to reduce one of the widest inequality gaps in Europe would also be painful and challenging. But why punish the rich when you can penalise the poor: there are more of them after all; so you’re less liable to miss.
Just the thing, you would have thought, for a party in recovery – like the Labour Party in Scotland – to get its teeth into. Not this watery facsimile of what the party once was, it seems.
Instead, the leader of Scottish Labour, Kezia Dugdale, has decided 2017 will be the year “to save the Union”. The party which has never recovered from sharing platforms with Tories during the independence referendum now wants to adopt the clarion call of Ms Davidson and “save the Union”. A few days prior to this Anas Sarwar, Ms Dugdale’s deputy, was rudely dismissive of any suggestions Labour in Scotland might consider making some alliances with the SNP on the common ground they share on social issues. Mr Sarwar was responding to a report by the Fabian Society that said the party should think about making common cause with the SNP to reduce the number of seats it’s expected to lose to the Tories at the next UK election. In rejecting any notion of this, Mr Sarwar said “the SNP hates Labour”.
The use of such language by Mr Sarwar was irresponsible and unnecessary. I simply don’t accept he genuinely believes “the SNP hates Labour”. Indeed by deploying such inflammatory rhetoric I rather think there may still be too many in the Labour leadership who might “hate the SNP”. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, though, and prefer instead to say Labour in Scotland has an unhealthy loathing of the SNP. This was apparent during the referendum campaign when I saw senior Labour people literally jumping for joy when news of the result began to materialise.
Many of us had never realised that among the higher echelons of the party in Scotland there was such a deep and abiding love and affection for the Union. Few of us, too, had ever seen these people show such unbridled passion at the plight of many of their own constituents.
They were though, happy to trouser the massive salaries and expenses granted to them by Westminster, having been sent there to represent people from some of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Europe.
In a thoughtful and prescient blog this week the respected former Labour advisor Andrew McFadyen also suggested Labour in Scotland, yet again, has its priorities wrong: “The growing link in voters’ minds between Scotland’s constitutional future and their attitude towards the EU makes Edinburgh a city to watch.
“Some 74 per cent of people in Scotland’s capital voted Remain, among the highest in the UK. This means there is a danger for Labour that its lack of clarity over Brexit could be as damaging in Scotland’s capital as its Unionism is in Glasgow.”
Meanwhile, Mr Sarwar, instead of circling the wagons and talking about tribal hatred ought to take his lead from the young Glasgow Labour councillor, Matt Perry, who is seeking to form an all-party alliance to explore the feasibility of a universal basic income to replace the current benefits system.
This is what Labour in Scotland should be doing, not slopping around in tribal enmities and saving the Union; leave all that nonsense to the Tories.
‘‘ Many of us never realised that among the higher echelons of the party there was such a deep and abiding love for the Union